Specification or Prototype-Driven Design: Which One is Right for You?
Have you ever thought about the difference between specification-driven design and prototype-driven design? I hadn't, at least until I took a recent course on design thinking. If you've ever developed a new product, service, or process, you've likely engaged in a type of design thinking. However, you may not have realized that different forms exist or that one style of design thinking may serve you better than another.
Specification-Driven Design
Traditional, or specification-driven, design focuses on companies identifying a new design opportunity and developing the design in detail. The actual making of the product takes place after the company has completed its research and specified the design elements thoroughly. Customers come into the process usually at the point of introduction of the new product into the market.
This form of design ruled the period of modernism that arose from the Industrial Revolution. Customer needs were so apparent that designers could develop detailed specs for designs that resulted in a life-transforming product. Innovators focused on making efficiency-focused products that improved customer quality of life by tackling specific life and household tasks that took significant time, such as sewing clothes, washing dishes, or traveling long distances. Today, in a post-Industrial Revolution world, Ted Brown, CEO of IDEO, notes that this form of design methodology has resulted in products that have all tended toward sameness with minor adjustments to distinguish between different models.
In an efficiency-focused environment, specification-driven design can make sense. Perhaps your company feels that its products could benefit from a cheaper, faster, or more streamlined design. In those situations, developing a new version of a current product using a specification-driven approach may help your company to meet its efficiency-related goal. However, if your company wants to venture into areas of more disruptive innovation, specification-driven design won't get you there. Author Michael Schrage proposes that a specification-driven approach focused on finding "the big idea" generally leads to product failure because it misses the mark in understanding what customers need and want today. Instead, a customer-focused, prototype-driven approach serves this purpose more effectively.
Prototype-Driven Design
In prototype-driven design, companies invite customers into the process at the earliest possible stage of innovation. The company makes rough physical or virtual versions of the product, sufficient so that customers, acting as codesigners, can interact with the prototypes and give their feedback at the very beginning, as well as at various iterations. Researchers Elizabeth Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers point out that an advantage of such codesigning with customers is the ability to test the product and make adjustments along the design journey, rather than reaching product roll-out and hoping that customers will respond with interest.
Instead of assuming that your company's big idea checks off all of your customers' boxes from the beginning, codesigning through prototypes increases the likelihood that your product will attract your customers' attention because it meets their needs. Prototypes can also introduce customers to new possibilities that they would not have considered, creating demand where it did not exist previously. However, keep in mind that prototype-driven design only works if the prototypes give customers a realistic feel for the product and don't have too much complexity. Author Vijay Kumar emphasizes that more iterations lead to better final products, but you can hit a point of diminishing returns with too much prototyping.
A Few Final Thoughts
Before you venture into choosing a design methodology, consider your company's goals. If you want to achieve better efficiency, using a specification-driven design method where you can define the details carefully from the beginning might work best for you. However, if you want to surprise customers with the innovation they didn't know they needed and exceed their expectations from the beginning, a prototype-driven design method can help you get into your customers' heads and understand what they want. You may even find that using both of these methods in the right contexts within your company may help you accomplish even more than one method alone.
Resources to Explore
Learn more by exploring the following resources on design thinking:
Brown, T. (2019). Change by design: How design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation. New York, NY: HarperBusiness.
Campbell, R. I., De Beer, D. J., Barnard, L. J., Booysen, G. J., Truscott, M., Cain, R., ... Hague, R. (2007). Design evolution through customer interaction with functional prototypes. Journal of Engineering Design, 18(6), 617-635.
Cobley, E. (2009). Modernism and the culture of efficiency: Ideology and fiction. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
Da Silva, G. C., & Kaminski, P. C. (2016). Selection of virtual and physical prototpes in the product development process. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, 84(5), 1513-1530.
Kumar, V. (2013). 101 design methods: A structured approach for driving innovation in your organization. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Sanders, E. B., & Stappers, P. J. (2014). Probes, toolkits, and prototypes: Three approaches to making in codesigning. Codesign, 10(1), 5-14.
Schrage, M. (2014). The innovator's hypothesis: How cheap experiments are worth more than good ideas. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Stu Minshew of the Chalmers Center introduced a group of us to Design Thinking at the SIL Revenue Catalyst Confab in Penang earlier this month. It's a very interesting approach. I especially enjoyed learning about Rapid Testing. Thanks for sharing this article.
Well written Jennifer! Very interesting concepts.
Great article, Jennifer. It's good to appreciate what the older design methods gave us even though they may not meet every need or be as popular today. I'm happy to see you getting into Design Thinking. One of the things that's difficult about designing software for minority languages is that we don't have systems to easily access our users—who often live far away with poor internet. That's made it hard for us to do the rapid testing that we want. Eventually, I hope that organization buy-in and research collaboration systems could help to significantly reduce the time it takes to test a prototype.
Factors that need to be considered in selecting the appropriate design approach include complexity and risk. Rapid prototyping usually includes less documentation of the complexities involved and that can lead to incomplete and inadequate testing. The more complex the design the less suitable rapid prototyping becomes unless the risk is low or unless the design advances in very small increments such that the prototype can be tested for the impact of the changes made. If risk is high this approach becomes unacceptable, astronauts & surgeons rarely depend on rapidly prototyped designs to the relief of their families and patients.
I'll suggest (and then hope that others will add to the wondering) that there is application of these two ways to leadership. Leaders can generate new ideas or strategies and develop them fully (individually or with a small closed group) or they can invite a broad and diverse community of people in to the process of idea development from the beginning.